Letters to David
Irving on this Website

Unless
correspondents ask us not to, this Website
will post selected letters that it
receives, and invite open
debate.

F.
Carter Dreves
writes on Saturday, May 1, 2010: "The photo is one
taken by Soviets at the Danzig Anatomical Institute
after liberation of the city. Several other photos
exist. Persons were Poles who had been
guillotined. Possibly the heads and bodies were
transferred there by the Soviets because this was
an outstanding propaganda opportunity. Danzig was
the site of the [alleged] "soap
experiments" and this is one of the associated
photos. The Soviets rearranged the heads and
bodies for subsequent photos. These photos were
used at the Nuremberg Trials by the Soviet
prosecution."

A Polish expert historian, in
Krakow,
confirms
(Thursday, September 10, 2009) that the "Auschwitz
atrocity photo" used to attack Mr Irving was not
taken in Auschwitz, but was a month after the war
at an anatomical institute in Danzig

HERE
IS THE EL MUNDO
INTERVIEW
OF DAVID IRVING (Title: "Hitler was a
simple man deceived by his subordinates")
WHICH
ISRAEL TRIED AND FAILED TO SUPPRESS -
but which the newspaper has unsurprisingly
so far omitted from its websiteclick
images to enlarge each page for printing
[translation
invited ]

More
lies. Note the photo of heads and
corpses, "an image of the barbarism
provoked at Auschwitz extermination/
concentration camp." But it is not
Auschwitz, Buchenwald, or
Bergen-Belsen.

Tell
us if you know more about this photo.

Photos
: El Mundo interview with David Irving, September
5, 2009; below, the photo used to illustrate the
"barbarism " of Auschwitz.

The
official photo caption in the Israeli archive
reads: "Camp inmates' severed heads and dismembered
body parts, in the Anatomical Institute in Wrzeszcz
[Danzig-Langfuhr]. Photographed in 1945.
Note: this institute carried out experiments to
produce soap from human fat. The bodies of inmates
were supplied by the Stutthof camp."
[Enlarge]
[Source]
[Israeli
archive catalogue
entry].

"Auschwitz
corpses" photo was faked, actually taken in Danzig
in June 1945

You can download it from there. Go to the
BLH
website, but using only Internet
Explorer 5.5, as with Firefox it comes to a
dead end [the page
also freezes with Safari and Netscape and IE for
Mac]; click on the link
ARCHIVES, and then on
SIMPLE SEARCH and enter the
word HEADS. You will find a
lot of hits -- including this very photo.

According to its caption it was taken in 1945
in the Anatomical Institute of the Medical Academy
in Danzig's Langfuhr suburb
[today Wrzeszcz in
Poland]. Of course, the corpses are
said in the caption to be of "camp inmates" and
used for soap
manufacture.

For myself, I am pretty sure that the corpses
had been taken out of the morgue and stacked in the
institute's courtyard ready for burial. The
photograph was probably taken by Nachman
Sonneberg, who was photographing in Danzig
during June 1945, and whose photographs are also
located in the BLH archive. This was the time when
corpses and body parts taken from the institute
were in fact buried at the nearby cemetery.

What about the many detached heads? In the
latter years of the war the institute was mainly
provided with the corpses of prisoners who had been
guillotined, from the jails at Danzig, Elbing, and
Königsberg. The heads were also removed from
other torsos, and for two reasons: first, the dead
bodies were thus "dehumanised" which made it
mentally easier for students doing dissections. And
then again, parallel to these students of general
medicine, the dental students had heads to work on,
which was the only part they needed.

For more data on the "Danzig Soap Factory" see
German Studies Review, XXI/1, pages 63 to
86.